By the time Phil Hartman decided to leave Saturday Night Live in 1994, he didn’t have the nicest things to say about his fellow cast members. In an Entertainment Weekly profile published in March of that year, Hartman was quoted as saying, “The shows are getting less sophisticated. There’s less political satire. The younger audience loves Adam Sandler.” Hartman went on to tell EW, “[Sandler] appeals less to the intellect and more to that stand-up sensibility of ‘Let’s go out there and be insane.’ I like Adam Sandler, but that’s not my kind of comedy.”
Despite his feelings about Sandler’s work, Hartman seemingly got along with Sandler behind the scenes, which is more than we can say about Rob Schneider. As David Spade revealed to Howard Stern in 2016, there was at least one occasion where Hartman and Schneider had a very uncomfortable encounter backstage. Apparently, the issue between the two stemmed from Hartman getting a young female college student a job as an SNL intern. The girl evidently was a friend of Hartman’s family.
David Spade Once Shared a Chilling Phil Hartman Story From Backstage at SNL
However, Schneider’s girlfriend, who was reportedly pretty attractive, wasn’t fond of the young woman and asked Schneider to fire her. Schneider did as he was told, but didn’t bother to run it past Hartman ahead of time. That’s why, according to Spade, Hartman came bursting into the writers’ room afterward and threw Schneider up against the wall. Hartman’s chilling words in that moment were said to have been, “I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
The quote is especially eerie, given that Hartman would die in exactly that manner just four years after his departure from SNL. On May 28, 1998, Hartman’s wife, Brynn, fatally shot him while he was sleeping—twice in the head, and once in his chest. She then fled the scene and confessed what she’d done to a friend of hers. Upon returning to the house later that morning, Brynn locked herself in the bedroom and turned the gun on herself.
Brynn, who was a recovering alcoholic and cocaine user, had recently fallen off the wagon, causing significant problems for the couple. Hartman was 49, and his wife had just turned 40.
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